The 185-Year-Old French Trick Is the Only Way I’m Drinking Coffee This Summer

Iced coffee is a 100% necessity for me as the temperature starts to climb. I’m a big coffee drinker, and I simply cannot abide a hot drink on a hot day. (No, thank you.) I would love a fancy cold brew from my local coffee shop every day, but that gets expensive real quick, so I make my iced coffee at home. We have a lovely little cold brew contraption and nice beans, and the coffee comes out great, but sometimes I can’t help but want to zhuzh it up a bit.

I’ve dabbled in making flavored syrups at home to fancy up my iced coffees, and sometimes I’ll get a flavored creamer, but for the longest time that’s where the innovation stopped. How many ways are there to dress up iced coffee anyway? Well, as I was delighted to find, at least one more. I recently came across the perfect mix-in for iced coffee that delivers a flavorful — and different — summer sipper: lemonade.

Iced coffee with lemonade is called “Mazagran coffee,” and its creation is credited to French troops defending the Mazagran fort in Algeria in 1840. To stretch their supplies, they began watering their coffee down with sweetened cold water, and the first iced coffee was born. Over time the new drink made its way to other European countries, and sweetened lemon juice replaced the water to create a new citrus-spiked coffee drink.

Lemonade is a surprisingly perfect addition to iced coffee, the two — seemingly conflicting — flavors really blend seamlessly into one another to make a drink that is more than the sum of its parts. It’s the brightest iced coffee I’ve ever tasted, lightly sweet with a citrusy background flavor. It’s even more drinkable and refreshing than a regular iced coffee, and I say that as a bona fide iced coffee addict. I know, it sounds like it shouldn’t work. Coffee is bitter, lemons are bitter. Coffee and citrus are not two flavors that generally go well together, but I’m here to tell you that they complement each other extremely well. So well in fact, that people have been adding lemonade to coffee for almost 200 years. 

There are two ways to make this drink, depending on what you have on hand. You can make it the easy way, by mixing equal parts iced coffee or cold brew and lemonade, or you can get a little fancier and mix up your own coffee-lemon syrup.

1. Chill the glass. Fill a tall glass halfway with ice.
2. Make the syrup. Add equal parts espresso or cold brew concentrate and lemon juice to the glass. The exact amount depends on how strong you want your coffee to be, but 2 to 3 tablespoons each is a good place to start in a 16-ounce glass. Remember, you can always add, but you can’t take away, so it’s best to start with less and add more after tasting. Add 1 to 2 tablespoons of sugar or simple syrup. 
3. Mix. Fill the glass with cold water and stir until well-combined. Garnish with a lemon slice, if you’re feeling posh.

• Add a pinch of salt. A little salt can really punch up the flavor. Add it in when you make the coffee-lemonade syrup, or just stir in a pinch at the end.
• Skip the creamer. This drink is best without the addition of creaminess. Save dairy and other creamy ingredients for your typical coffee drink.

This post originally appeared on The Kitchn. See it there: The 185-Year-Old French Trick Is the Only Way I’m Drinking Coffee This Summer